From 0 to Raspberry Pi (start with Raspberry Pi)

So, you decided to start with an Raspberry Pi. For example for a small Nagios monitoring server. This short howto will explain you how to start with Raspberry Pi.

Requirements:

The handout here was written for a Raspberry Pi Mod. B Rev 2.0 with 512 MB RAM running on an Transcend Extreme-Speed SDHC 32GB SD Card and powered by a Nokia AC-10 Micro USB device. In this howto we will use a Windows PC to access the Rasberry Pi.

1.) At first download the latest Rasberry Pi from here (store it in e.g. C:\00Raspi) and extract the ZIP file to your HD (e.g. C:\00Raspi\image).

3.) Now download W32DiskImager from here (store it in C:\00Raspi) and expand that (e.g. to C:\00Raspi\win32diskimager). [The current version is 0.7]

4.) Now insert the SD Card in your PC and check which drive is used.

5.) Now run the W32DiskImage as Administrator. Select the drive with the SD Card and the image you downloaded and extracted in step 1. After that write it to the SD Card via the write button.

Note: depending on your PC it might take some minutes until the tool appears!

6.) If the write finished, Enable SSH by placing a file named "ssh" (without any extension & content) onto the boot partition of the SD card

7.) Now unmount and remove the SD Card from your PC, insert it into the Rasberry Pi, connect the Rasberry Pi via LAN to your Network (there should be a DHCP Server in place) and connect it to the power device.

8.) Once the device booted you can connect to it via putty. To do that start putty and use the IP address which is assigned by the DHCP Server.

9.) If everything is working correctly you see now a black screen where you can enter a username and password. Use

user:pipassword:raspberry

here now.

10.) At first start the Raspberry config via:

sudo raspi-config

Inside that menu perform the following actions:

10a.) "Localisation Options" -> Change Timezone

10b.) "Localisation Options" -> Change Wi-fi Country

10c.) Change the "Hostname"

10d.) Then switch to the "Advanced Section" select "Expand Filesystem" (to make sure that the full disk space from the SD Card is used and not only 2 from the default Image we used)

Once you changed the above, reboot your Raspberry.

Note: this can be done for example via:

sudo shutdown -r now

11.) Once the reboot is finished you can connect again to your Raspberry Pi as mentioned above via putty. Then check the result from the disk expansion via:

df -h

which should show you now GBs of free space (around 27 GB)

12.) Now its time to update the Debian OS on the device via:

sudo apt-get update

and then:

sudo apt-get upgrade

depending on your internet connection this might take some time.

after that reboot your Raspberry Pi via:

sudo shutdown -r now

13.)

Now its time to change the password on your Raspberry Pi. To do that login via putty as described above and run again the config via:

sudo raspi-config

then change the password via "change user password".

14.)

Your Raspberry Pi is now ready to be used.

Here are some usefull tips now:

Get Hardware version

cat /proc/cpuinfo

It will output something which includes something similar like the following: